CPP confirms indispensable role of legal front organizations
ON January 2, the New People’s Army’s Roselyn Jean Pelle Command-NPA Northern Negros executed businessman Juvie Sarona in front of his home in Toboso, Negros Occidental. Mr. Sarona, the NPA said, was punished for his alleged role in the Oct. 20, 2018 massacre of sugar workers in Hacienda Nene, Sagay City. Ka Cecil Estrella, the spokesman for the Roselyn Jean Pelle Command, claimed that the victim was the leader of a military-backed gun-for-hire group that has been doing the dirty job for big landlords.
The allegations have been denied by both the victim’s family and the military. Also, if indeed Mr. Sarona was involved in such violent crimes as alleged by the NPA, presenting the evidence to competent authority rather than subjecting him to vigilante-style justice would have been the civilized manner of bringing justice to the Sagay massacre victims.
The murder, however, reminds us that the official justice system has failed to bring justice to the victims of the massacre. The authorities filed multiple murder charges against two organizers of the National Federation of Sugar Workers. They had recruited the victims. The government claimed that the massacre was part of a grand plan of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) to make the Philippine government look bad. These were not credible allegations.
The NPA has a long memory, and while Mr. Sarona was not given the chance to defend himself, it is unlikely that the NPA did not have some evidence showing a connection. The violence could have been avoided if the government — the police, the prosecutor, the Department of Justice, the local government — had seen to it that the investigation of the massacre and prosecution of perpetrators had met the highest standard of credibility. We, the public, would then have no doubts that the NPA was telling a lie in order to justify the murder of Sarona.
A week later, also in Negros, a casual employee of the Guihulngan City government was murdered by elements of the Leonardo Panaligan Command-NPA Central Negros. Fifty-four-year-old Eddie Delosendo was liquidated for being an “intel asset” of the police, that is, for reporting activities of suspected NPA supporters to the Guihulngan City police.
Ironically, according to the Philippine Army, all five NPA fronts in Negros Island have been dismantled. Dismantled or not, within January, aside from the two executions perpetrated by two different NPA commands, there have been at least three encounters: in La Castellana and Calatrava, though alleged by the NPA to be “fake,” and in Sta. Catalina. A 26-year-old farmer who had joined the Rachelle Mae Palang Command-NPA Southeastern Negros in 2021 was killed in the encounter in Sta. Catalina.
The CPP-NPA thus got itself another “martyr” to inspire more youths to join the revolutionary struggle as the party has embarked on its third rectification movement. “Proletarian industry, humility, steadfastness, militance, optimism and courage” are being sought, not the corroding “rust of petty bourgeois mentality,” according to the CPP in its Dec. 26, 2023 message on the occasion of its 55th founding anniversary.
The rectification movement is being “waged” to “overcome and repudiate critical errors and tendencies, weak
nesses and shortcomings in the ideological, political and organizational fields,” including the armed struggle.
Errors and weaknesses notwithstanding, the “Party is firmly united in waging protracted people’s war along the strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside.”
The CPP message emphasizes that armed struggle remains the “main form of struggle that aims to accomplish the central task of seizing political power.” Is this a repudiation of the peace talks?
Further, the “legal forms of struggle are secondary but indispensable in waging the national democratic revolution in order to arouse, organize and mobilize the people in their millions, and to generate widespread political support for the armed struggle.”
I highlight this point because here we find the reason why the state can’t simply look at all types of activism as nothing but activism. Organizations and individuals that are part of the national democratic movement are part of the CPP’s “national united front.” As stated, they have a crucial part in advancing the armed struggle. The same armed struggle, manifested in attacks, ambushes, liquidations, raids and extortion under the threat of violence, makes the CPP-NPA a terrorist organization.
This, on the other hand, does not exonerate the government from being responsible, by act and omission, for the persistent poverty and injustices affecting millions of Filipinos. These factors remain the underlying drivers of insurgency. The murder of Juvie Sarona happened because the perpetrators of the Sagay massacre were never brought to justice. The Sagay massacre happened because of the sorry state of rural development in general, agrarian reform in particular. We need to dismantle not just rebel fronts but the root causes of insurgency.